Navigate your Mac without a mouse
Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?
Six Colors subscriber Tod was out of luck a few weeks ago, when he wrote me:
How is my dad supposed to pair a Bluetooth mouse to his iMac without a working mouse of any sort? We can get to the Bluetooth pairing screen using Spotlight, and the mouse is visible, but we can’t figure out how to press the Connect button with just a USB keyboard.
By the time I’d connected, Tod’s brother had gone off to collect some peripherals, and they were able to complete the process.
My immediate reaction was: Just press Tab or Shift-Tab. Had I tried this? No. When I did, I discovered my muscle memory had… what’s the opposite of atrophied? It was like a ghost limb, a ghost Tab/Shift-Tab sequence that didn’t work.
After some diligent research, including posts that had the wrong information, I discovered that all you need to do is press Control-Fn (or Globe)-F7. (See “A functional afternote” near the bottom of this article for more on that key sequence.) Using that keystroke toggles the option in System Settings > Keyboard for “Keyboard navigation,” thus restoring my ghost muscle memory to reality.
I think it’s worth digging deeper into cases in which you need an alternative to a mouse or a keyboard to complete operations.
The mouse that roars
I was present at a very awkward moment in 1992 between Apple’s then CEO, John Sculley, and a product manager for a software package. I was the “course manager” at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine. My job entailed a mix of keeping 100 Mac IIfx’s and lots of other gear running, and working with the education director (my friend Charles) to design curriculum. People visited to take multi-day courses on cutting-edge equipment.1
During an invitational event, which tech industry and artistic luminaries attended, Sculley was there and getting some hands-on training with Atex Renaissance, a desktop-publishing application Kodak was developing to compete against QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker. Honestly, he was a very nice man to deal with, even when I was a lowly stiff. However, he took umbrage at one point—when a Kodak product manager was helping him use Atex.
Kodak Person: Just type Command-K and it will format the text.
Sculley: How do I do that with a mouse?
Kodak person: You can’t. The keyboard is better.
[Pause]
Sculley: No, it isn’t.
You could feel the frost in the air. Apple has been mouse-forward since even before the Macintosh, starting with the Lisa. Over 40-plus years of development, the mouse has almost always been a first-class citizen.
Sometimes—don’t tell Mr. Sculley—a mouse is worse. This is particularly the case for toggle states and repetitive actions that you can rapid-fire to more easily press, press, press on a keyboard.
If you want to know all the Mac keyboard shortcuts you can use, Apple maintains a convenient reference page that I have conveniently managed to avoid knowing existed until now. The list starts with things I imagine most of us have burnt into our fingers, and couldn’t speak the actual sequence required, like Command-grave accent (`) for rotating through open windows in the foreground app, or Command-Option-H for hiding all windows of all apps except the current foreground one.
It moves on to some more obscure ones, including using the power button with modifier keys, sometimes only available on keyboards that lack Touch ID. For instance, you can restart your Mac from a Touch ID-less keyboard by pressing either: Control–Command–Power button (don’t prompt to save unsaved documents) or Control–Option–Command–Power button (do prompt, just like Apple > Restart).2
You can elevate the keyboard even further through an Accessibility setting.
Key to success
Full Keyboard Access is yet another accessibility feature that offers specific benefits for individuals who cannot easily use a point-and-click device or are unable to use one at all, as well as general benefits for everyone who prefers an alternative to movement-based input. Enable it in System Settings > Accessibility > Motor > Keyboard.
Once enabled, the thing you’ll notice most prominently is that you can tab through switches, buttons, and other fields that typically require clicking. As you press Tab or Shift-Tab, the focus moves through interface elements. Use the Space bar to select, and Control-Tab/Control-Shift-Tab to move among items that you can’t navigate through using the arrow keys.
You get some bonus modifier-key commands, too, using the Tab key uniquely as a modifier like you would Control or Option:
- Tab-W: Show a list of available windows in the current app.
- Tab-F: Search for items in the current view.
- Tab-A: Open the Application Chooser.
To view the full range of special commands, press Tab-H. You can customize the appearance and behavior by clicking the “i” info icon to the right of the Full Keyboard Access switch.
We put the fun in function keys
Many Mac users tend only to use function keys to control the features printed on them by Apple and third-party Mac keyboard makers, like increasing or decreasing volume or brightness.
To use a function key like F7 (labeled with a rewind symbol and F7 on Apple and third-party Mac keyboards) as an F7 key, you also have to press the Function key, typically labeled fn (in lowercase like that). On some Apple keyboards, it’s instead the symbol of a globe, possibly with fn in tiny type below it.
You can change that default, however, if you use function keys enough or prefer them to the Mac-specific features. Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. Click Function Keys and enable “Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.”
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
- What I always say about Kodak is that the company’s digital products and strategy were 10 years ahead of their time in 1992. Then, by 2002, they were somehow 10 years behind. An amazing feat to pull off. ↩
- Apple seemingly has an error in this keystroke description, stating it shuts down your Mac, equivalent to Apple > Restart, instead of restarting your Mac. ↩
[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]
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